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Happy No Co-Pay Birth Control Day!

Today’s the day! Those of you with health insurance will now be offered a no co-pay option for birth control pills. Now you can stop resenting your male sex partners for saving hundreds of bucks a year by not having a uterus.

However, I had a weird thing happen. I wonder if anyone else’s insurance did this. My prescription plan has three tiers—generally generics are tier one and cost $10, less-expensive non-generics are tier two and cost $30, and expensive stuff (like my precious Advair) is tier three and costs $60 a pop. I’m on a generic birth control pill that’s been tier one forever, because, you know, it’s a generic.

A few months ago I got a notice saying my pills were being transferred up to tier two, which totally sucks because changing pills can do weird stuff to your system, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Then just recently I got the notice that starting this month, they have to offer the no co-pay pills, but only pills on tier one will be no co-pay. I went to look and they’d transferred other pills up to tier two as well. So people on those pills either have to change over to one of the free options, or pay triple what we’d been paying for generic pills. Sneaky, no?

I realize complaining about your health insurance’s prescription plan is basically like bitching that they’ve been really skimping on the gold they’re stuffing in the lobsters lately, but still. Anyone else have shady stuff go on with their birth control around this mandate?